The Social Skill Every Great Founder Has (That Nobody Teaches You) with Paul Bakaus

Paul Bakaus started coding at 11, sold his first company to Zynga, and spent years at Google working on Search, Chrome, and ultimately as their first head of creator relations with a focus on bringing creators back to the open web. Later on at Spotter, he built AI tools for creators like Dude Perfect and MrBeast. He's now the founder of Renaissance Geek and building Impeccable, an AI-powered creative tool for YouTube creators.In this episode, Paul and Healey get into the social skill that separates good leaders from great ones, why most people are terrible at asking the right questions, and why being nice at work can be the unkindest thing you do.In this episode, we get into:- Why everyone in the room is the main character of their own story, and how the best communicators use that to win every room they walk into- The pitch deck trick Paul watched a colleague use at Google to get promoted every single time, and what it actually reveals about how people make decisions- Why being nice and being kind are completely different things, and how California's passive-aggressive culture gets this exactly backwards- What FBI hostage negotiators and top Google executives have in common when it comes to getting people to say yes- Why the world's best car salesman outperformed everyone else by 10x using a single postcard- How AI sycophancy is actively making you worse at thinking, and what to do about it- Why Paul's team at Renaissance Geek now needs a one-hour standup just to stay aligned, and what that tells us about where product teams are headed- The open source move that made Paul "criminally" generous, and why it kept coming back to him in ways money couldn't buy- Why most early managers kingdom-build out of fear, and what Paul did when he flipped the script entirelyThis full episode of Don’t Be a Jerk is live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.